


that mad sweetheart

by darlingofdots



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/M, the inherent eroticism of beating each other up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-18 04:35:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28737360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingofdots/pseuds/darlingofdots
Summary: a rival and an ally vs that mad sweetheart matthias
Relationships: Pyrrha Dve/Matthias Nonius
Comments: 20
Kudos: 36





	that mad sweetheart

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to the like, three whole people who will care about this.

Honestly, it was how sweet he was about the whole thing. Such a gentleman.

When I opened your eyes, your lungs were still knitting themselves back together, which was not an enjoyable sensation, but you and I have had worse; I gritted your — my, for the moment — teeth and sat it out. I never bothered much with anatomy, so I cannot provide the kind of blow-by-blow you and the others seem to enjoy so much, but at some point I went from wheezing for breath to _breathing_ , so that has to be good enough. It was certainly good enough for me. I pushed to my elbows.

I’ll be honest — I hadn’t the faintest clue what the fuck was going on. You’d gone under, probably because of the lung thing, and I’d come up, and here we both were. We were on our knees in something that looked like a cave, with greasy gravel covering the floor and sharp, cracked walls. It was dark as God’s arse in here, except for a circle of anaemic light from a pocket torch that was stuck awkwardly into the gap between two stalagmites. It wasn’t your pocket torch. My hands tightened on my rapier and spear.

“I see you will still not give in.”

Despite our freshly-regrown lungs, I sprang to my feet, spear in hand. I couldn’t make out the owner of the voice until they moved and I saw the shadows shifting. A person stepped into the light, gloved hands raised, but there was a black rapier strapped to their belt and, I thought, a dagger of the same material. They were dressed in all black, too, Cohort polymers that looked like they had been dragged to the River and back.

“Why should I?” I said, with a throat so raw I sounded almost like you. “I am not dead yet.” Whatever my later transgressions, I had vowed to fight your battles more than nine thousand years ago and I would not break that oath that night, nor the next.

“You are not,” the stranger conceded. They did not seem disappointed, which was a good sign.

Your tired synapses finally scraped together enough spark some kind of understanding so I could parse the information presented to me. The rapier and dagger identified your opponent as a cavalier trained and sworn, and the haphazard smears of black and white paint made them a cavalier of the House of the Ninth.

“Nothing for it, then,” I said with a shrug that subtly angled the spear towards the stranger’s heart.

“I suppose not.”

And we fought.

Oh, how we fought! I have not felt that alive since I died, and when I say it was exhilarating I am not nearly doing it justice. It is a pity that it was only the two of us in that cave; that duel ought to be in history books. There should be poetry about it, horrible poetry that overuses words like ‘declaimed’ and ‘thou’ and doesn’t even rhyme properly, and teachers ought to torture their pupils by making them memorise it. Before the first impact of blade on blade, I wondered how anyone could have gotten close enough to wound us so gravely; after, I wondered no longer. By the third exchange, we were both breathing hard and by the sixth I let out a burst of air that sounded something like laughter, yours or mine I can no longer tell.

It was not until the nineteenth, with a dagger pressing into the unprotected space underneath our ribs and the tip of my spear pressing into the unprotected space underneath the stranger’s chin, that I even questioned why we were fighting. It was also the first time, standing just on the edge of the circle of shitty torchlight, limbs locked together like the pieces of an impossible puzzle box, waiting for the other to flinch first, that I gave in to temptation.

“Tell me your name,” I said, increasing the pressure.

“You would have the advantage of me,” the stranger said, mirroring the movement. We were both of us drenched in sweat and your blood was drying on your clothes.

“I see no problem with that.”

“Of course you would not.”

Somehow, we broke apart, circling each other with rapiers raised like predators fighting over a carcass. “What kind of warrior waits for an enemy to recover,” I asked, philosophically, “instead of striking a fatal blow?”

“The kind that was brought up to respect their opponents,” the stranger replied in the same tone, “no matter who they might be.”

“You are of a dying breed, then.”

“Perhaps. So are you, I suspect.”

I exploded forward; the stranger neatly dodged, and brought the flat of their dagger up to parry my strike with a lightning quickness that made my heart sing with joy. There is something truly beautiful in a fight to the death, which I expect you of all people must understand. It is not just the adrenaline and the frantic scrambling to block and counter and duck; there is elegance in skill, and speed, and lethality, and a kind of insane joy and delight in the knowledge that this time you really might die, that this breath might really be your last —

But of course, I would not let a stranger kill you. Not in a place like this, forsaken by God and everyone else, where nobody would even know to mourn you. I drove the butt of my spear into the wrist holding the dagger and my knee into the softness of the stranger’s belly, and while they gasped for air I drove them backwards into the ground, one booted foot pinning their swordhand to the gravel.

Panting, the stranger lay beneath us, paint smeared with sweat and blood, pupils blown wide. With deliberate slowness and not the hint of a smile on your lips, I rested the tip of my rapier where the carotid throbbed painfully under delicate skin.

“I concede,” the stranger said. It sounded like an invocation, or a sacrament. And then: “I am Matthias the Ninth. If I am to die here, tell my House where to find me so that my bones may be laid to rest with the bones of my people.”

I made a choice then, which perhaps you would scold me for if you knew; I lowered my rapier. “I have no wish to kill you, Matthias the Ninth.”

I held out my hand. After a moment of hesitation, Matthias the Ninth took it and let me haul him to his feet.

“My thanks. Will you give me your name, so I might know who fought me so valiantly?”

I licked your chapped lips. “They call me the Saint of Duty.”

“I did not know my adversary was one of the Emperor’s Most Venerated Saints,” he said, inclining his head. “It is an honour to do battle with you.”

And then he sprang towards me with such explosive, lightning agility that I _did_ laugh, a single bark of delight. His blade and mine crashed into each other with the screech of metal on metal echoing in the void of the cavern, again, and again, and again. He was strong enough that each impact rattled our arms up to the shoulder, and it was _exhilerating_. He pummelled me backwards into a wall, each strike as perfect as Dominicus setting over Trentham, and for the love of all that is good and right in the universe, I could not stop myself.

It was my first such transgression since I died the first time, and I wish I could promise you it would be my last. What a lie that would be, and I never could lie to you, my love. But as the jagged walls of the cavern buried its teeth in our spine and Matthias the Ninth pressed his advantage and dug his elbow into our sternum, I bent your head and closed your eyes, and I kissed him.

I was just as surprised as you are. Almost as surprised as he was.

The sharp bony point of his elbow disappeared and I dropped my spear and pushed my hand into the dark hair cropped close to his skull. There was a moment of startled shock in which we were both overcome, I think; him by surprise, me by the piercing violence of my need. I had not touched, or been touched, in nine thousand years, not like this. Not with this sudden, overwhelming hunger, nor the exquisite ache of desire as I drew his bottom lip between mine and tasted paint. For nine thousand years I had wanted, and I had been so good.

I kissed him again. The cavalier of the Ninth gave a single gasp, a soft exhale that seemed to carry with it a load I could not comprehend, and melted a little into our chest, which would have been marvellous if not for the rock attempting to puncture our kidneys from behind. I squirmed, which he must have taken as dissent; he drew back and I followed, bereft, with too much force. In pushing away from the wall I toppled both of us over backwards, sending Matthias the Ninth scrambling into the grit with us atop him, body braced over his, but I felt the solid muscle of his thighs beside mine and saw the way his throat worked and did not hesitate.

I shall be the first to admit that this was madness. I did not believe, at that time, in the power of adrenaline and battle-madness to drive a person to such insanity, but I was too preoccupied in the moment to question it overmuch. A shiver ran down our spine when Matthias the Ninth, almost shyly, ran his tongue along ours and pressed his hips upwards, just as mad as I was. When I made no attempt to move, he took me by the shoulders and planted his feet and levered himself up and over so he had me on the ground beneath him, his knee between ours, and I had not felt like this before; not in nine thousand years had I known such need, or singularity of mind. It was not like being myself. I could never be myself again. But this was something I understood, intimately, and so I grasped for it with both hands.

My love, when we spread your robes and his on the gravel and shed our clothes and I touched him for the first time, I was as if resurrected anew. He sighed beneath me, writhed for me like a man at the edge of the abyss, and I took those sighs into myself where I could take them out and examine them again with leisure later. His hands hot on your body, our body, on _me_ , skin against skin, breath coming hard and fast, I discovered a piece of myself I thought I had lost. I was forgetting so much, all the time, in the haze of inertia and paralysis that was the universe through your eyes. Right then, I saw with perfect clarity.

I fucked Matthias the Ninth until we were both gasping and loose-limbed in the freezing air, legs tangled with stray pieces of clothing and swordbelts, and then when the cold sent my skin up in goosebumps I did it again. I suppose I should be apologising and begging your forgiveness, but the truth is that I would do it again if I could, and I have done much worse since then. You are well entitled to be angry with me. But I am not sorry, and your anger would be wasted.

He insisted on sharing his meal with us afterwards, which I only accepted because I know you would not have. We did not speak while we ate, sitting on the gravel outside his rickety shuttlecraft. The fibres of some stringy, pickled vegetable stuck between our teeth. I caught him looking at us across the empty space between his crossed legs and ours, our rapiers laid out at our feet. I did not know what had brought us — you — to this place, or how you intended to return to the gilded graveyard at the edge of everything. I watched the shuttle doors close after him and shielded my eyes from the sparks of ignition as it left me behind. I gathered your clothes and my weapons, sat with our back against a stalagmite, and waited for you.

**Author's Note:**

> No, I don't know why they were fighting in the first place. I have never written 'a plot' in my life and I do not intend to start now, thank you very much.
> 
> On tumblr @darlingofdots


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